Tuesday 18 Jan 2011
This morning for our civilization class it was back to the British Museum! This time we were studying Mesopotamia and I came across several clay tablets from the oldest surviving library. Assyrian King Ashurbanipal brought together a huge library of clay tablets written in cuneiform, one of the earliest forms of writing, during his reign from 668-631 BC. If there was a legend not already written, his scribes wrote it. He also may have thrown his name onto a few tablets here and there just for good measure…
Anyway, there is a tablet from the first “epic” of world literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. On the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, there is a story about a man named Ut-napishti who builds a huge boat and puts his family and animals inside after the gods warn him they are planning to destroy the world by flood. Um, does this story sound familiar to anyone?? This part of the oldest Epic in the world isn’t just a story. It’s part of our history. It was translated back in 1872, so I guess lots of other people already know about it, but I hadn’t and I thought it was awesome!
In the evening, the whole BYU group went to go see Wicked!! What does this have to do with our studies? Ummm…. Oh, I’ve got it. You can be friends with people who are different than you and there can be a place where many cultures live happily together – just like London.
Warning: Don’t read this if you don’t want to know the ending.
Btw, Wicked was AMAZING! Elphaba’s voice and acting had me awestruck. The last song in the first act, Defying Gravity, gave me chills. The lighting and special effects were awesome. Basically, I loved it. However, I was almost disappointed at the ending. I know this is morbid, but I was a little disappointed when it turned out that Elphaba and Fierrot were still alive. I just thought it would have been a perfectly tragic ending…
